Masozi does not have the slightest idea what this guy is talking about! 

He is maybe going to ask...someone else. Someone less shouty. He really doesn't like being threatened, and he doesn't-like it in a way that makes it awfully tempting to do something about it, but it's clearly not going to help his cause in the long run to make even worse enemies of this stupid enclave full of stupid people. 

He does not allow himself to look even slightly perturbed, just turns and walks casually away and up the stairs. 

(While extending every single sense he has in search of mals, because right now he is extremely not in the mood to let them come within ten feet of him, and at least trudging up eight flights of stairs while fuming lets him build enough mana to mostly cover it.) 

New York senior stomps back in. "He's definitely maleficing. You kids need to trust your instincts. Something seems off, someone's giving you bad vibes...being a bit of a dick to a random person is much less of a risk than letting a maleficer follow you around learning who he can peel off."

Julia puts the boys' clothes back. "I did tell him to fuck off! But he was really insistent and I didn't want to be, like, a bitch -"

"Be a bitch," the senior says, and jumps back onto his pullup bar. 

"Okay, mom," says Julia, but the senior shoots her a look more withering than her mom is even capable of, so she cuts that out. 

Silas is meanwhile sorting through New York's junk for the stuff the other enclavers requested. Chloe had wanted a sheet stripped off a graduating student's bed, to hang below her void ceiling, which freaks her out, and had also laid claim to some beanbags stitched together from spare fabric and stuffed with more spare fabric, which will be nice for hanging out in her room for study groups. She'd also expressed an interest in any excess art supplies, especially paint and stencils, for a mural on her wall. Magnus had requested a bright and reliable desk light, a better door lock, and some bookends that his books would like. Emma had wanted a quilt too, or if there weren't enough quilts to go around a box of fabric scraps she could get someone to quilt for her, and a well-behaved hairbrush and a light strip if available. Bennett had asked for a bunch of extra shelving, things he could use for padding to make his desk chair ergonomic, and at least two extra pillows. 

"What do these lights run on?" Julia asks the senior even though he's quite unreasonably pissed at her and is probably going to answer rudely. 

          "Alch oil, the good ones burn a couple tablespoons a day, the crappy ones will go through quite a lot of it. Should be in that crate."

"Spaceships are brightly lit," Julia says reflectively. "What I really want is a mirror with a light strip around it, so I can do my makeup, but I might need to make that."

"Do we have a way of cutting the metal sheets into new shapes, or do we need to be figuring out a solution there, too?"

How do you even cut metal, do you use, like, specialized circular saws? She has a saw, but she's pretty sure it's for wood and not metal. She's not seeing any circular saws here. They're also gonna have to fasten it together, if they want to make a desk, which - what is that gonna take, welding? She doesn't know how to weld things. But Julia seemed very confident that this was doable, so probably there's something here.

(Wow, she sure does seem weirdly confident that she can build a desk if she figures out what the right tools for it are and how people use them. That seems completely unwarranted, but maybe her earlier confidence that she couldn't build anything ever was also unwarranted? Probably they'll find out.)

"Does anyone already have a good solution for metalshaping or should we be looking for one?" she asks more loudly than Karen did, looking mostly at Lysander, who seems to be carrying some tools.

"I can't cut metal in precise rounded shapes yet," Lysander says, "unless you folks have a really nice saw, but those sheets look thin enough that if rectangular shapes are adequate we can definitely break 'em," he mimes marking a line and bending them back and forth several times, and then, patting his trusty spiked tool which he's hoping will hold him until he can start collecting things out of supply cabinets, "and I can punch holes for nails." This is more a summary of the procedure he would actually execute to make precise straight line cuts on sheet metal, there's also some magic and extra steps, but he figures they want a general idea and it's the minion's job to execute details. 

Oh thank God, someone who knows what they're doing. "I think spaceships can have rectangular furniture," she says, hoping this sounds uncertain enough that it's clearly an attempt at offering interior design brainstorming and not an attempt at telling Julia how she should decorate her room. "Especially if we could sort of do - a rectangle with some trapezoids on the sides that sort of hug you a bit, I feel like that could have a sci fi battle station vibe?"

Oh wait that sounds much harder than just a normal rectangle, maybe she should have thought of a case for normal rectangles as spaceship-y instead. Uh. She can help Lysander hold stuff when he's working to offset the inconvenience she possibly just created, maybe??

"Yeah, all right," says Julia generously, "we can do rectangles and trapezoids. Though the edges should be sanded down enough I can't cut myself by accident while I'm doing yoga - does New York have a sander," she asks the senior -

"Not right now, they're nasty when they get moody. Someone in artificing'll get it mid-semester and you'll have, like, a week."

Fortunately for Karen('s sense of guilt), he doesn't seem terribly concerned about the prospect of trapezoids, which do not involve any curves, and is nodding agreeably. The more complex the desk slash art installation, after all, the more chance to find out how competent the rest of these aspiring maintenance folks are before he's figuring out who to trust to watch his back in the ductwork, so long as it doesn't get so out of hand they all end up spending way more mana than they get hauling the materials up the stairs. 

Oh boy, no sander. Okay. "We can bend the outward facing edges," he suggests, "so they're rounded instead of sharp." 

Julia smiles at him. "Sounds good. All right, by the time we get all this stuff up to the freshmen dorms it's gonna be nearly dinnertime, let's get moving." She picks up one pillow, herself.

No time like the present within Orion Lake's field of view, specifically, to grind mana by carrying heavy things up eight normally very hazardous flights of stairs!

He will start refilling a well-behaved necklace gem with that activity for now, he thinks, he hasn't been able to get his hammer to hold mana yet and suspects it'll take a great deal more babying. Whatever is the heaviest thing he can get a shoulder under which probably means awkward to pick up with only two hands even if it'll be fine once settled in a comfortable carrying position... somebody here probably has a sense of efficiency and can make that happen. Vernon, maybe? Vernon definitely has a vibe of being on the ball about Silent Helpful Coordination. Lysander arranges stuff into a suitable pile, points some body language at it, shoots his fellow minion a hopefully meaningful glance. 

Rebecca finishes tying on the shoes, bundles up her clothes stash, and takes one end of the rug.

 - oh, Julia should hold the rug too so it doesn't think she doesn't like it. She drops the pillow and takes the other end. "I love you," she tells the rug. "You're the best thing that has ever happened to me, and a lot of really nice things have happened to me. Once, someone came up to me in the street to say I should be a model."

“Those shoes are really pretty!” Zeke says to Rebecca, who he probably shouldn’t try to carry up the stairs. “Or, like, not in a way where they were really pretty before you put them on, but you’re super pretty! So they’re super pretty? I dunno.”

He is going to make up for not carrying Rebecca by carrying ALL of the things. - actually he is only going to carry some of the things, his armspan is only so accommodating. He is going to carry all of the things that reasonably fit within his armspan.

Vernon is totally on board with Silent Helpful Coordination! He catches Lysander's look and is there to help near immediately. Here he is, assisting with carrying stuff.

"Thank you! I might draw on them later to make them prettier if I find a good pen for it."

“I, like, totally have pens! You should have one of my pens.”

Julia exchanges looks with Silas which mean that Zeke is being completely ridiculous and they're not allowed to say anything because you never criticize an enclaver around outsiders.

The senior seems less bound by that. "If you get her pregnant I'll tell your dad and I bet he'll send you a cursed care package," he says, herding them out the door with their armsfull of stuff.

Eep.

“Fraaaaaaaank,” complains Zeke, who knows this senior’s name, and then he is ushered out.

... he does not know how to reassure Rebecca that he could borrow abortion pills from the stockpile and stuff and also that it’s not like they’re even going to have sex, like, unless she wants to - he half hides behind his large stack of carried items and starts heading up the stairs.

"I should probably have a no-shoes rule in my room, right?" Julia croons to her rug. "You don't look like you'd like people stepping on you in nasty shoes they've been running all over the Scholomance in. Only the thing is, you're not supposed to go around barefoot in case there are mals that will bite all your toes. And I am willing to risk my toes for you, but if I get them bitten off I'll get blood all over you! Maybe I can have one set of indoor shoes and one set of outdoor shoes, and a shoe rack at the door to change between them. Or maybe you can help me out with the mals - do you have any way to let them through you so they fall into the Void?"

The rug, being a rug, does not answer; she'll get her answer the first time a mal has a go at her in her room.

Karen has a box that was carefully unpacked into other boxes and the repacked to be full of building supplies and space-themed decorations. She still doesn't know how mana generation works and is kind of expecting, without thinking about it, that it either fills up whenever you sleep or slowly regenerates naturally over time, but she is feeling a bit less weirdly hollowed out than she did when she first arrived.

"So, uh, how does objects having opinions work, are all magic objects like that?" she asks the group in general, because this seems important and it's not like she's really trying to hide that she was sort of metaphorically born two hours ago in this area specifically.

Vernon is carrying things, but doesn’t feel like what he’s carrying is very worthy of narration. He’s convenient wallpaper, nobody cares how heavy or awkward this bundle of building supplies is for him. But the answer is ‘very.’

“Generally speaking, yeah. Goes off their nature and what they’re used for, with variance like for people,” answers Vernon, “Ordinary objects can pick up opinions from hanging around a bunch of mages, too. Scissors tend to have a bit of a bloodthirst to them, it’s why they tend to go rogue so much.”